U.S. Warships Arrive in Shanghai With AM-China, Bjt

BEIJING (AP) _ As pro-democracy demonstrations rocked China, three U.S. warships arrived Friday in Shanghai for only the second U.S. Navy port call since the communist government was founded in 1949.

The goodwill visit came one day after Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev visited Shanghai.

The warships originally were scheduled to arrive Thursday but were delayed for one day. Although no official explanation was given for the delay, the Soviets apparently saw the coincidence of the port call with Gorbachev’s visit as a diplomatic affront.

The three U.S. vessels sailed up the Huangpu River, common waters for foreign warships at the turn of the century when foreign powers dominated Shanghai with gunboat diplomacy. Decorative flags dotted the masts and sailors lined the rails for a look at China’s largest city.

More than 200,000 students and workers marched and rallied through the city of 12 million Friday for the second straight day in support of larger, related protests in Beijing. About 100,000 were gathered a short distance down the Huangpu River from where the American vessels docked.

Barry Matney, a press officer for the Seventh Fleet, said the command and control ship USS Blueridge, the cruiser USS Sterett and the guided missile frigate USS Rodney M. Davis will be in Shanghai until Monday.

He said the 2,500 naval personnel aboard the ships had been advised to avoid the demonstrations but were to be granted liberty to visit the city as scheduled. He said they were to be in uniform when touring the city.

He said not many people watched the arrival because most people were more interested in the demonstrations.

The first U.S. Navy port call to communist China was in November 1986, when three warships visited the Yellow Sea port of Qingdao. Last month a Chinese Navy training vessel visited Honolulu in communist China’s first port call in the United States.

George H.W. Bush (1989) President George H.W. Bush on a working visit to Beijing, China in February 1989. President George H.W. Bush on a working visit to Beijing, China in February 1989. China-embassy.org Just 36 days after being sworn in as president in 1989, George HW Bush became the fastest American head of state to embark on an official visit to China. During the mid-1970s, Bush served as head of the US Liaison Office in Beijing for two years, which was ambassador in all but title - official diplomatic relations started in 1979. During his time in Beijing, Bush earned himself the nickname ‘bicycle-riding envoy’ because he often cycled around the Chinese capital, accompanied by his wife Barbara. Upon their return to the country, the President and First Lady were presented with two ‘Flying Pigeon’ as gifts. Bush couldn’t resist jumping onto the famous Chinese-made bicycle and posing for photos in front of the assembled media. The short two-day state visit in 1989 saw Bush meet with Chinese President Yang Shangkun and Premier Li Peng. At the welcome banquet, Bush repeated America’s commitment to the principles set forth in the three joint communiques. “And based on the bedrock principle that there is but one China, we have found ways to address Taiwan constructively without rancour… And this trend, this new environment, is consistent with America's present and longstanding interest in a peaceful resolution of the differences by the Chinese themselves,” added Bush.

Soros, the CIA, and Black Devils: The Truth About Tiananmen Square

Really?

In March of this year, Aryan Skynetspotlighted the race-based resentment engendered by the presence of African students in the Soviet Union. As an article published today at The Unz Reviewcorroborates, the Russian frustration with blacks was not an anomaly within the communist world – nor, as will probably not surprise Skynet readers, was the bloodshed of Tiananmen Square precipitated by spontaneous popular unrest alone. “The idea that any elite – let alone the child-worshipping Chinese – would murder its own children for demonstrating peacefully over legitimate grievances is even sillier than the notion that they were demonstrating about democracy,” begins Godfree Roberts in “Tiananmen Square, 1989 – Revisited”. Instead, the students “were demonstrating about money and sex,” he suggests:

1989 was a most uncommon year: the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, the seventieth anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, the centenary of the Second Communist Internationale and the bicentennial of the French Revolution. The USSR was coming unglued and Deng’s Reform and Opening had, says Orville Schell, “rammed Chinese society into reverse gear, stampeding the country into a form of unregulated capitalism that made the U.S. and Europe seem almost socialist by comparison”. Radical market-price reforms caused a major inflation and popular, student and worker unrest. […]

Reform and Opening – as far as common people could see – was a disaster and little was needed to light the fires of protest […]

State owned companies dumped millions of workers into the labor market and inflation consumed their severance pay, designed to last six months, in as many weeks. Graduates found themselves in the worst employment market since the war where, it seemed, only those with political connections got hired. A survey showed that the average university graduate earned less than high school matriculants. Government subsidies were cut to the bone and professors’ incomes reduced. […]

The situation was volatile, but violence would require a catalyst, and the CIA was ready and eager to provide it. […] As The Vancouver Sun reported, “For months before the June 3 attack on the demonstrators, the CIA had been helping student activists form the anti-government movement, providing typewriters, facsimile machines and other equipment to help them spread their message, said one official”. The CIA moved Gene Sharp, author of the Color Revolution manual, to Beijing where financier George Soros had incorporated the eponymous Fund for the Reform and Opening of China. […]

George Soros

In 1986 Soros endowed his Fund for the Reform and Opening of China with one million dollars – a huge sum for China those days – to promote cultural and intellectual exchanges with Zhao’s Institute for Economic Structural Reform. In 1988 the National Endowment for Democracy opened two offices in China, gave regular seminars on democracy, sponsored select Chinese writers and publications and recruited Chinese students studying in US. In February 1989, two months before the CIA launched its Tiananmen destabilization campaign, President Bush paid his first and only visit to China.

When the student protests erupted in late April the NED mailed thousands of inflammatory letters from Washington to recipients in China and aroused public opinion through Voice of America (VOA) shortwave radio broadcasts, in Mandarin, across China on the days of the protests. In Nanjing, university students had boom-boxes turned high as the VOA described events in China.

Deng had CIA strategist Gene Sharp arrested and expelled to British Hong Kong, whence he directed the insurrection, as he recounts in his memoir, Non-Violent Struggle in China. Another CIA operative, VOA’s Beijing chief, Alan Pessin, provided encouragement, provocation, strategic guidance and tactical advice in round-the-clock broadcasts and students who were there still talk of the VOA’s promised land of “freedom and democracy”. […]

At midnight on June 3, six weeks after the protests began, troops began moving from the railway station into the city under orders not to fire unless fired upon. An officer later testified at the official enquiry, “If we had been allowed to let ourselves go, one battalion would have been quite sufficient to quell the riot but, with rioters hiding behind onlookers, we had to stay our hand”. On the way in one soldier was seized, thrown from an overpass and killed, another doused with gasoline and set alight, one was clubbed to death and disemboweled and three major-generals were attacked and hospitalized. Rioters looted weapons and ammunition from captured trucks and attacked government buildings.Leaders distributed knives, iron bars, bricks and chains, urging people to “take up arms and overthrow the government”. At six the following evening loudspeakers told Beijingers to remain indoors as troops had been ordered to suppress the uprising by force and, when the soldiers moved in, rioters burned hundreds of vehicles, including sixty armored cars and thirty police cars.

Roberts quotes NYU Professor James Hsiung’s account of what transpired in Tiananmen Square:

After midnight, I saw troops trotting on foot from the East towards Tiananmen Square, without helmets or weapons. As they were approaching the square, they were blocked by huge crowds and were forced to retreat, trotting back in the direction (east) they had come from. On their retreat route, the troops were chased by the crowds, many throwing rocks and bricks. Not long after, troops returned by truck, this time with helmets on and weapons in hand. By then, the crowds had set up more roadblocks. As the trucks were negotiating their way through, the crowds stopped them with a barrage of rocks. This free-for-all went on for some time, during which many soldiers were either killed or wounded; and some lost their weapons to the ruffians. Then came the armored reinforcements spitting sporadic fire, apparently in revenge, into the crowds along both sides of the road. Besides the ruffians and students, many were merely onlookers. The crowds, however, fought back hard. They climbed atop the on-coming tanks. Some even used Molotov cocktails or the equivalents of a flame-thrower against the tanks. One tank went ablaze. As the three soldiers inside opened the latch to run away from the heat, some hooligans shouted: “Kill them, kill them!” A BCC (Taiwan) radio reporter on the scene recorded the shouting. He later told me that he saw the three soldiers killed by their maulers. A Chinese-American friend, in whose house I had been a dinner guest only two nights before, later called and told me that a similar attack took place in front of their apartment building. One soldier’s corpse, lying by an incinerated troop-carrier truck, I was told, was set on fire by his killers, who had poured gasoline on the body. In all the cases we knew, the ruffians were much older than most college students and did not appear to be students at all.

He then quotes another account that gives the lie to the popular notion of a despotic Chinese crackdown and virtual genocide in the square:

About 4:10 a.m. all the lights at the square went out. A lot of soldiers came out from the East entrance of the Great Hall. […] At about 4:30, the martial law troops announced over the loudspeaker, “Attention, students. We have agreed to your appeal. We will allow you to leave peacefully”. The announcement was broadcast over and over again. At about 4:50, the students around the monument began to leave. I looked around and saw that there was almost no one in sight. So I came back with the students. That was at 5:05 a.m. This was what I saw at the time. No one was killed throughout the whole process. Some people with ulterior motives who had fled abroad spread rumors that Tiananmen Square had been a blood-bath and that they had had to crawl out from underneath the corpses, which was sheer nonsense.

Roberts continues:

Famous Taiwanese entertainer Hou Dejian summarized his experience of the finale, “Some people said that two hundred died in the Square and others claimed that two thousand died. There were also stories of tanks running over students who were trying to leave. I have to say that I did not see any of that. I don’t know where those people died. I myself was in the Square until six-thirty in the morning”. Future Nobelist Liu Xiaobo remained to the end and said he saw nobody harmed.

On June 19, Beijing Party Secretary Li Ximing delivered the results of the official enquiry. More than 7,000 were wounded or injured and two hundred forty one killed, including thirty-six students, ten soldiers and thirteen People’s Armed Police during a riot in Chang’An Road.

For all its failures, tragedies and confusions, the Tiananmen incident ranks among the most successful propaganda campaigns in history. Long after the massacre story was disproved, foreign journalists – all of whom had left the Square – told readers that students had been demanding Western values in the face of “Red Chinese totalitarianism”. Their fabricated massacre gave the West an excuse to embargo China yet again, and to label it an international human rights pariah.

Some journalists, sinologists and officials had second thoughts. “I believe we tried to put a ‘made in the USA’ democracy stamp on it,” said Jackie Judd of ABC. Photographer Jeff Widener said he took the Tank Man photograph on June 5, more than a day after the students had left the Square. (Associated Press still distributes the image as if it were from June 4, so look for it). […]

Students had discovered their leader, Chai Ling, leaving the square and, accusing her of abandoning them to die, detained her. She escaped and recorded a speech saying that she witnessed at least twenty students and workers being massacred in the Square. She was given a scholarship to Princeton University and nominated for the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize. Though he had left the Square hours before the military arrived, another leader, Wu’er Kaixi claimed that he witnessed tanks killing hundreds of protesters by driving over them as they slept. Liu Xiaobo, later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, helped the students avoid bloodshed and was pardoned. He, too, said that nobody in the Square was harmed.

The vice-president of the Tiananmen student body and leader of the riot in Chang’An Avenue, Wang Yam, was smuggled to the UK and given British citizenship. In 2006 he was tried in London, in the first British murder trial to be held in secret, for bludgeoning to death an elderly man. The Crown Prosecutor demanded that Wang’s trial be held in camera and the trial judge assented and gagged media speculation. Wang Yam was convicted of first degree murder and MI6, Britain’s intelligence agency, admitted that he was their employee.

The hoax of the tank holocaust notwithstanding, the anger of many young Chinese during these years was very real. As Roberts reveals, there was also a violently vocal racial element to the economic discontent of the eighties.

The withdrawal of Mao’s tuition subsidies crushed the dreams of millions of families thirsting for education and the government’s decision to maintain scholarships for African students touched off race riots. Thousands of Nanjing students chanted demands for reform, waved signs like “Kill the black devils!” and rampaged through the Africans’ student quarters, injuring many. The anti-African demonstrations spread to Beijing where, late on the night of April 19, student militants carrying banners saying, “No Offend Chinese Women,” yelling “Kill the foreigners!” and screaming insults at Deng marched on Party leaders’ living quarters at Zhongnanhai.

As eyewitness Lee Feigon relates, “The police seemed remarkably tolerant, unflustered by the constant jeering and screaming. Many who watched doubted that the American Secret Service would have reacted so genially if a similar mob were battering on the gates of the White House in the middle of the night. This was carried to an extreme at about 2:30 a.m. when the police tried to clear the crowd and some of them were pushed back onto a cluster of fallen bicycles. One tough picked up one of the bikes and smashed it over the head of one of the police. He was not arrested”.